Artificial intelligence composes songs about the forest fire disaster and the Covid-19 epidemic

Beautiful the World is one of the 13 songs competing in the first song-writing competition with AI, the world's first hosted by radio station VPRO (Netherlands).

Inspired by the Eurovision TV song competition, the organizers called on teams to participate by submitting a three-minute song written entirely or in part using artificial intelligence (AI).

The winning song, Beutiful the World , was composed by a group of computer scientists, producers and musicians from Uncanny Valley music studio in Sydney, RMIT University. and University of New South Wales .

Dr. Sandra Uitdenbogerd from RMIT University commented that the song is an electronic song from Daft Punk but in a "very disruptive 'way. She also said the song has been accompanied by challenging events in 2020 - including the Australian bushfire disaster and the Covid-19 pandemic.

'When we started the writing process, Australia was still experiencing a wildfire disaster. So we used AI to turn the sounds of koalas, kookaburra and Tasmanian beasts into a musical instrument, to reflect concerns about wildlife. network in the forest fire disaster. Some time later, the corona virus arrived and we all had to stay home. A large part of the lyrics speak of this experience, ' said Dr. Uitdenbogerd.

The team from Universities in Australia won the song Beautiful the World.

The entire lyrics and melody are created by artificial intelligence along with human intervention. Music producers from Uncanny Valley use algorithms to create new tunes based on excerpts from 200 Eurovision songs - including ABBA's famous song Waterloo. The lyrics are created by entering the words 'germ' into the computer. From there, the computer will come up with a series of sentences to choose from.

Dr. Uitdenbogerd's role is to provide matching lyrics and melody techniques based on an algorithm that she perfected in her doctoral dissertation.

The winning song at the contest was selected based on the votes of the audience and the opinions of an panel of AI experts including Mr. Vincent Koops (Netherlands), Ms. Anna Huang (USA) and Mr. Ed Newton -Rex (UK). The jury appreciated the quality of the contest entries.

'Creating a song with AI is difficult because you have to face the inherent challenges of composing music, and master the machine learning technology. The participating teams not only challenge their own creative limits, but also give the audience a glimpse into the exciting future of music cooperation between humans and AI, '' said Dr. Uitdenbogerd.

Please listen to the song Beautiful the World.